You are not your brain – Alva Noe’s new book
Just got a new book by Alva Noe: Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.
Description from the book jacket:
Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. InOut of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain. Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don’t have a clue. In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.
This book is really exciting to me as I am beginning to see the light in the end of the neuroscience/cognitive science tunnel in the image of neurophilosophy, neurophenomenology and, specifically, embodied approach to the human cognition/experience. Having a humanities background, I’ve always struggled with the current neuroscience framework, both professionally and on the personal level. Psychology in general and neuroscience/cognitive science in particular, have been dramatically moving away, severing all ties with philosophy and other humanities, striving for objective empirical science that is somehow free from all subjectivity. While many see it as a great achievement, some, myself included, feel that there must be a place for phenomenal and experiential in psychology if what we truly want is to better understand human consciousness.
I can’t wait to read it, I enjoyed Varela, Thompson and Roch’s The Embodied Mind: Cognitive science and human experience, as well as Thompson’s Mind and Life. And I’m hoping that publication of this book signifies that this emerging domain which brings together the best in neuroscience, phenomenology and philosophy, will be taken seriously to challenge existing ontologies and will help us better understand the human condition in its richness and awesomness.
If my baby’s nice and she starts taking long naps I might even read it before the end of the month…
Here you can read an interview with Alva Noe about his new book.
And here you can watch and hear Alva Noe talk about consciousness and life.
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Fetal sheep were implanted in utero electrodes and their brain activity was recorded at .7 and .9 gestation time (106 and 130 days). With complicated nonlinear mathematical analyses, cyclical activity was visible as early as at .7 gestation time. Although this activity was different from later (at .9 gestation time) clear REM-NREM division, patterns of cortical activation and deactivation, somewhat similar to REM and NREM sleep were already present. So early fetal sleep has its own alternating cyclical patterns, which, at a certain developmental moment change into familiar sleep architecture which then is relatively stable during the adulthood.
